How to Choose Octaves to Sound Epic

By Darren DeFranco

Hey guys,

In today’s lesson we’re going to take a deeper look at octaves. Specifically, we’re going to figure out how to choose which octaves will work best to layer over a chord progression. While there is no one way to do this, using chord tones is a great strategy you really can’t go wrong with. So over a C chord, for example, you’d want to play an octave of C, E, of G – the three notes of a C major chord. We’ll show you how this works!

Let us know if you have any questions!

Now that you have an idea of how to layer up these octaves, try creating an octave part over the following chord progressions: